Jamie Sarkonak: Conservatives should learn from Trudeau’s Senate strategy

If your opponent is fast-tracking vocal allies to the upper house of Parliament, you should prepare to do the same

Get the latest from Jamie Sarkonak straight to your inbox

Published Sep 05, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Kristopher Wells holds a Pride taped hockey stick at Claire Drake Arena n Edmonton, Alberta on Dec. 17, 2015. Photo by Perry Mah/Edmonton Sun/Postmedia Network

By appointing a raving gender ideologue to the Senate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did nothing wrong. But boy, is the upper house of Parliament going to be a pain for years to come.

This new Alberta representative in the upper house is Kristopher Wells, MacEwan University professor, Pride Tape inventor, Canada Research Chair and on-call academic activist. He can reliably explain to the uneducated public that all conservative parties in Canada have “been hijacked (by) far-right extremists”; that the federal Conservative party “is now a party of hate, extremism and division”; and that any talk of restricting cosmetic cross-sex hormones amounts is evidence of a “conservative agenda” to “restrict access to life-saving health care for anyone they don’t agree with.”

Article content

The windmill he’s tilting at is very scary.

Still, one must admit that it was a decent strategic choice to anoint Wells a senator. His values check out, having pushed for legislation requiring Alberta schools to allow children to create LGBT student clubs, and prohibiting those schools from notifying parents if their kids joined. He found mild success, and the rules became law in 2015 (only to be rolled back in 2019). In those years, Wells also drew substantial media attention by promoting rainbow hockey tape.

True Senateworthy prestige was gained when Wells obtained a Canada Research Chair in 2019 — which happens to be the same year that the Liberal government imposed strict diversity quotas on the program, with a mandate to “create significant change” in federally funded research. The award laundered him from an Edmonton education policy guy into a national authority in the emerging field of gender minority youth. Well-executed fast-tracking, if you ask me.

As a senator, Wells will no doubt be a thorn in the side of the next government. Last fall, the Conservative party membership voted to add protection for single-sex spaces (prisons, changerooms and washrooms, for example) to its policy book, as well as single-sex categories in sports and awards. It also added an official party stance against sex-change medical interventions for minors. The policy book doesn’t commit a future government to actually acting on these stances, but it does outline expectations. Poilievre seems on board, in any event.

Article content

Article content

Other areas for reform could include Canada’s ban on conversion therapy, another focus of Wells’ activism. Billed to the public as an unobjectionable Criminal Code amendment that protects gay and lesbian children, it went much further by criminalizing any instruction to trans-identifying children that they are not, in fact transgender. Those who try to dissuade their newly they/them-identifying nine-year-olds, who just happen to be learning about the pantheon of neo-genders in school, are vulnerable to catching charges.

The great indignity of this “conversion therapy” ban is that it only applies in one direction. It’s a crime to convince a trans-identifying kid that they aren’t trans, but it’s perfectly legal to convince kids that they are trans. This leaves the door wide open to schools telling children that their “body is the gender and sex I say it is,” as was taught in one Ontario school, and even encouraging those students to live as the opposite sex without informing their families, as has been the experience of at least a dozen parents who’ve spoken with the National Post.

Article content

It may also be worth revisiting the Liberals’ 2017 human rights protections for “gender identity or expression.” Currently, anyone found to have deadnamed and misgendered contrary to the Canadian Human Rights Act can be liable for paying thousands in compensation for their wrongs. Indeed, it’s rude to not call people by name they wish to be called — but whether such transgressions should cost a person large sums is another question.

The Liberals’ ambitious social agenda has outpaced general public opinion, priming the ground for a tectonic correction that will quake in about a year, if not earlier. Even if the Conservatives win a large majority, even if they manage to pass legislation quickly through the House of Commons, any bill they write will have to squeeze its way through the Senate — the vast majority of which will have been appointed by Trudeau.

If the Canadian convention holds, the Senate will continue to perform its role as a legislative copyeditor and not a bill-blocker. There’s a chance, though, that it won’t: writing in The Hub in May, former Harper government staffer Howard Anglin, with co-author Ray Pennings, pointed out that Trudeau’s “independent” senators lack party accountability and thus might not be so restrained — indeed, they might even see their unaffiliated status as a licence to run up against the House.

Article content

Will Wells see it that way? His doomsday rhetoric hints “yes.” Even at the provincial level, Wells has accused New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs of threatening “the very principles of democracy in Canada” by contemplating the use of the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to ensure that his restrictions on gender transitioning for minors survive court intervention. In Alberta, he’s claimed that Premier Danielle Smith is moving the province toward a “totalitarian dictatorship” and “moral theocracy.”

The shrill urgency will only grow when it’s the prime minister he’s talking about.

All that said, the Liberals are just playing the game as it’s supposed to be played: you win, you appoint your senators and judges, and you leave. Stephen Harper failed to do this, and instead gifted his opponent 22 empty Senate seats to fill.

Conservatives will stomp and insist that the Senate must be reformed into an elected body; that it’s undemocratic; and that by golly, Trudeau has corrupted it by appointing so many people — so many activists — to its halls. But reforms are a long shot. Time is better spent getting that red chamber shortlist ready: vocal partisans, unflinching academics, people on the younger side of 45, all with the necessary level of stubbornness to survive subsequent Liberal governments.

If Kris Wells and, indeed, Charles Adler have made it to the Senate, their analogs on the right need to make it, too.

National Post

Recommended from Editorial

1. 

   Adam Zivo: Pediatric trans care is often conversion therapy for gay children

2. 

   Jamie Sarkonak: Danielle Smith is the antidote to Trudeau's DEI agenda in universities

Article content